What God Forgot
Thirty miles south of Tiliard, a child’s body is pulled from the river.
The boatswain is the first to spy the corpse, and the slim smuggling vessel kills its sugar motors to drift alongside it.
The wheels spin to a stop, dripping silver from their blades, and the crew lines up on the starboard gunwale.
It is a rare event for a creature to emerge from the river, and usually indicative of something infinitely blessed or deeply cursed.
It is unclear which category this one falls under.
The body is small, and fresh, dressed in frayed trousers and a shirt whose diluted stains are still recognizable as blood. A BGS tattoo tells the crew this is another bizarre casualty from upriver, a young soldier caught up in all that Revivalist business.
The crew’s doctor is called (who is not a doctor but a cardiomancer parading as one), and he lays his bare thumb over the child’s radial artery, over the tattoo, where he finds no pulse, but a remarkably strong will.
The captain considers throwing the child back into the water, but as it happens, the crew is shorthanded.
An extra cabin boy is a small mouth to feed, so the child is cleaned, given a blanket, a meal, a name, and put to bed in a hidden cabin, between a crate of stolen perfumes and a stack of erotic ladies’ magazines.
At first, he is as useless as he is wordless; he shakes too badly to hold any rigging, and at night, he keeps the crew awake, tossing and sobbing relentlessly.
But as the ship makes her way down to the fume wastes and back, unloading art and wine at stopovers, trawling for scrap metal in the viscous doldrums of the southern Catoptric, the boy steadily recovers.
He begins to speak, but not much; he begins to work, but not well.
By the time they dock in Dagdrun at the end of the month, the captain has already made plans to pawn him off.
He meets with a local vintner in his cabin, to whom he shows off the boy, remarking on the symmetry and slenderness of his feet, perfect for crushing the kind of airy vintage the region is famous for.
He is of the age where the children are most productive and need the least supervision, so the vintner gladly offers a seasonal contract.
Unfortunately, right before the captain can press the child’s thumb to it, the local sheriff, who has received a notice from the nascent régime in Tiliard that smugglers have now been added to the Borisch Manual and may be summarily disposed of, seizes the docks.
The ship is raided, then sunk. A few of the crew die in the firefight, a few escape, the rest are captured.
The cabin boy is among the unluckiest of these three groups; he is marched with the rest of his ilk to the orchards, where within the day the sheriff tries them, judges them, and hangs them.
Times are lean; the ostler is deputized as executioner, the scraggly plum trees as gallows.
The only priest available to say rites is a disgraced exile from the city, stripped of everything but his thumb name and a small villa at the edge of town.
One by one, the smugglers fall, first the captain, then the boatswain, then the rest of the crew. The cabin boy is near the end of the line, and when his turn comes to ascend the stool to the noose, the priest lets out a doleful moan.
As soon as Eir Davide Bateusse sees the boy’s face, the familiar frown, the silky, curly hair, the glint in his honey-rich eyes, a crushing pain seizes his heart.
He has never met this child, but Davide recognizes the furrow of his brow, the dirge he hums, almost humorously, as he ascends the stool.
It is Faustech’s march into hell, with all Hock’s unique trills and flourishes.
“Eir Sheriff,” the priest says. “Please. Not that one.”
The sheriff hesitates. He is a practical man, reluctant to spare young offenders who have a rich life of crime ahead of them. But he is also a man who appreciates a little irony, and he can’t resist the poor priest when he whispers his confession.
“I beg you, Eir Sheriff,” says Bateusse. “That one is … is my son.”
His compatriots howl and holler as the cabin boy is ushered away from the orchard, but they are shortly silenced.
The child is spared the noose, but he doesn’t escape justice completely.
Thanks to the humble request of Eir Bateusse (and a gift to the township of Dagdrun of ninety thousand marks, the last of the bishop’s fortune), he is instead sent to the reformatory of Mongfestun, where he will be punished, rehabilitated, and sculpted, over the next ten years, into a worthy gentleman-soldier.
The day he sets foot in the repurposed monastery, in fact the very hour he is deloused and examined by a mercifully indifferent reformatory nurse, Wherewithal, Inc.
, surrenders its holdings to BGS, and Bertram Gorslung sits for his first portrait.
It is an early attempt at what will come to be known as Revivalism (but is still called, for desperate want of something better, Post-Neo-Repressionism).
It is “passably decent,” according to the Rhizosphere, an assessment Gorslung considers far worse than an insult.
Immediately, the painting is burned, the artist’s workshop is fumigated (as well as the Rhizosphere printing house), and the Chancellor’s search for his perfect likeness begins.
The first years are, by far, the worst. Guy barely remembers the early days.
He recalls no trial, no sentence, only hours of cold, miserable shock, the throb of his injuries, the blindfolds, the restraints, the shouting of the guards, blunt force, a heinous stench, a spray of freezing water.
Then four walls, close as a coffin’s, a cage of infinite dark.
The grief percolates slowly, over hours, days, weeks.
It first throbs in his ear, then moves down his jaw, to his heart, forcing him to roll to one side, then the other, clutching his chest, clawing at the walls of his cell, two paces wide and three long.
Deprived of the passage of time and a sense of place, he can do nothing but add his voice to the chorus of howls and moans spilling ceaselessly from the other cells.
Months pass.
The city changes above him. With the Sreckt factories destroyed and Reames’s expertise taken to his grave, the Revival stutters—momentarily, but enough for the Ministry of Aesthetics to mount its last defense.
A bloody year ensues, marked by ecdytoxic misfires and rapid cycles of increasingly destructive retaliation.
Fortunately, by the time the violence reaches its peak, most of the city is already under the influence of the nascent Revivalist movement.
Maximian Sorav, the newly named Marshal Revenant, deploys what is left of their weaponry with great strategic prudence, and Dr. Nichola Whyck takes up the mantle of company alchemist, then Surgeon General.
Using the scraps Reames had left behind, she attempts to rehabilitate the teratopod, facilitates its next molt, and in the meantime squeezes as much ecdytoxin as she can from whatever sources she can, including the contaminated.
The first time Whyck visits Guy’s cell, two Tender Guard come with her.
They hold his wrists as she kneels beside him, inserts the needle through his eardrum, and pulls a few meager drops of silver fluid.
The extraction doesn’t relieve the pressure, only exacerbates his unique tinnitus.
He thrashes, narratives curling in his ear, blasting their accompaniment in the deafening throb of a headache.
His tongue writhes with verse. When he tries to scream, his voice comes out an even, beautiful tenor.
By the time the Grand Marshal deigns to visit him, dressed in his white panoply and armed with an experimental perfume of mayfly, the months have whittled him down to a splinter of a man, naked but for a blotchy patina of bruises.
“Help me” is all he can moan when the Marshal kneels to lay a hand on his sunken cheek.
“I’ll get Dr. Whyck,” Sorav replies, so gently, so kindly, it’s all Guy can do not to spit in his face. “Whatever you need—I’ll get it for you.”
“Paper. I need paper, Dawn.”
“My name is Maximian.”
“I need fucking paper,” Guy groans.
Eir Davide Bateusse follows the cabin boy to Mongfestun.
For a few weeks at a time, and entirely for free, he offers his spiritual services to a monastery which hasn’t seen a monk in a thousand years.
After speaking to a dour man he takes either for a headmaster or a warden, he settles into the empty chaplain’s quarters, conducting the mealtime rites and hearing the confessions of the valley’s delinquents, from teenaged lordlings caught with a gram of third-eye exudate to the ruffians who murdered customs officials to smuggle it.
The first time he sits in the booth with his adopted cabin boy, he hopes for an explanation, a story he can piece together from a list of sins. But all he gets, after a half hour of prodding, is a name.
When he returns to his villa later that month, he lies beside his wife and rolls it on his tongue, trying to map it to a familiar face.
Vant Passand. Mallory vant Passand. He has never heard the name in his life, but he repeats it in his sleep, then over the breakfast table, then over lunch.
His wife, already harrowed by the forfeiture of their savings in service to a young, random stranger, forbids him from returning to Mongfestun.
“I think I’m dead,” Mallory tells Davide during his next confession. “I’ve died.”